brainwagon

Where your host describes the fun he’s been having with his new cell phone and his travails in trying to get MythTV installed.

Links for the show:

• The Motorola MPx220, my new Cingular cell phone
• Useful sites for MPx220 information: mpx200.org and pdaphonehome.com
• My ASCII television hack: over two years old, but still fun. Inspired by aatv.
• Anandtech’s Guide to Building a Linux PVR, which inspired me to get off my butt and give it a try.
• The Official MythTV site
• These guys provide the program data for MythTV
• A nice site about MythTV on Fedora

I’ve currently got video recording from an old Brooktree 878 card (made by Pinnacle) working at 320×220 at 60% or so cpu load on my aging 800mhz Celeron box. There seem to be very few problems with dropped frames or synch. Unfortunately, there do appear to be significant problems still with sound when watching Live TV: the video lurches and I get prebuffering audio errors in the invoking xterm window. I’m also having quality issues with horizontal streaking: I’m beginning to suspect that it’s the card.

I’ll keep you all posted on my improved efforts.